At 10 Pacific / 1 Eastern today, Steve Jobs will give the keynote address at WWDC, Apple's developer conference. The focus is supposed to be the next version of the iPhone and iPad operating system (iOS 5), the next version of the Mac operating system (Lion) and a new cloud storage system called iCloud. We'll find out in a few hours what Steve Jobs has to say about iCloud today, but if you want to see what he said about something similar 14 years ago, check out this video of Steve Jobs talking at WWDC back in 1997. This was just a few months after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, before he became CEO and when his only role was to be an advisor. Around the 16 minute mark, Steve Jobs says:
In the last seven years, do you know how many times I have lost any personal data? Zero. Do you know how many times I've backed up my computer? Zero. I have computers at Apple, at Next, at Pixar and at home. I walk up to any of them and log in as myself. It goes over the network, finds my home directory on the server, and I've got my stuff, wherever I am. And none of that is on a local hard disk.
Jobs also admitted that he wasn't a fan of the Newton, but he did see a future for a small connected device in an interconnected world. You can see around the 1:03 mark that Steve Jobs is starting to think about what will one day become the iPhone:
To me, the high order bit is connectivity. The high order bit is being in touch, connected to a network. That's why I bought the Envoy, it had a cellular modem in it. I don't think the world is about keeping my life on this little thing and IR'ing it into to my computer when I get back to my base station. To me what I want is this little thing that I carry around with me that's got a keyboard on it, because if you do e-mail you need a keyboard, until you perfect speech recognition. You need a keyboard. You don't sit there and write stuff. You need a keyboard. And you need to be connected to the net. So if somebody would just make a little thing where you are connected to the net at all times, you've got a little keyboard like an eMate with a modem in it, my God I'd love to buy one. But I don't see one of those out there.
Watch the full keynote to see more vintage Steve Jobs, saying many things that are still relevant today:
(Link via TiPb and The Tech Bench.)
